Half Life was good, no doubt about it. But, as was pointed out in the article this linked to, System Shock 2 had a better plot, that plot was more was more integral to the gameplay, and was generally spectacular (much more interesting, in my view, than HalfLife). But it didn't sell well at all.
I think the reason it didn't sell was because it tried to straddle the boundary between RPG and FPS. You had to develop your skills and sneak around rather than blasting everything in sight like a FPS, which probably alienated some Quake fans. And you did have some very challenging combat sequences, which probably annoyed RPG fans.
People often call the boundaries between genres artificial (in games and otherwise...think SF/Fantasy/Horror), and they are. But gamers have come to expect certain things of games that go by the terms "FPS" or "Adventure" or "RPG" or "RTS"; mixing aspects of two or more will mean they don't know--and may not like--what they're getting. So even when great, innovative games are made, like System Shock, they don't always sell. Who's to blame? Not the companies. Gamers.
Re:Question: What about remixes?
on
Napster Wars
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· Score: 1
Given that the maximum amount of time you can legally sample a song without paying the artist/copyright holder is 0
Are you sure? I was under the understanding that it's allowable to briefly "quote" from a copyright audio sample, just as with text, without violating the copyright. I don't know, however, if there's a specific amount of time that can be legally sampled/quoted. The scheme of attempting to reassemble a track from small samples would probably be illegal (as well as horribly tedious) because the intent is not to quote (which is fair use) but to pirate. Might as well just distribute the whole song as far as the law's concerned.
As a closed beta tester who had lots of fun with it, I'd like to say it once and for all:
The stress test sucks. Bad.
The stress test is not the game. It is as representative of it as the demo to the original Diablo, with the first two levels of 16 and only the warrior. In fact, given that Diablo II has 5 character classes as opposed to 3, I imagine that the stress test shows even less of the game than the Diablo demo.
What do you have to look forward to in the actual game? Well, for one, you have not merely one, not two or three but four other classes, each one far more interesting to play than the barbarian--IMO of course! I for one am not going to waste my time with the barbarian--my first character will be a Sorceress, Paladin, or Amazon, all three of which have interesting skills and much more of that complexity of gameplay you speak of. (Curiously, I found the Necromancer a bit dull as time went on.)
The closed beta was good (particularly in how they manage multiplayer), but I'm sure the final game will be much better, with more places to go, more monsters to kill, (hopefully) more challenge, and more great items (which are after all the point of Diablo).
I share your view about the lamentable passing of Looking Glass. However, the situation with Looking Glass is a bit more complicated than that; Eidos wasn't the only contributor to the disaster, and even if it were, Eidos has problems bigger than Ion Storm and Daikatana. Here's an explanation from an ex-Looking Glass employee.
(Still, I have to wonder: why is it so hard to get good games published? And why don't gaming companies make more innovative games like Thief? Then again, the same mediocrity exists in Hollywood, the music industry, TV, and American pop culture generally...)
At least in the closed beta, Blizzard selected applicants in part based on the geographical distribution they wanted. If 100k Koreans and 100k North Americans apply, Blizzard isn't going to give half to Koreans and half to Americans...the point is to test their servers in a reasonable manner.
Plenty of people will get in on the open beta. Not that it's going to be all that great, since it contains an abridged version of Act I with only the Barbarian, the least interesting character to play (yes, I'm one of those lucky closed beta testers). A day's amusement, if that.
Recently you wrote an interesting article about how readers of eBooks may lack the rights readers of paper books currently have.
This article got me wondering what would become of libraries if, a few decades from now, most written information was electronic. (Because of lower electronic publishing costs I believe paper's days are numbered.) One option could be having vast numbers of books stored on a system of public servers free of charge, or for a small charge. Or we could turn to the system, like most newspapers online do for their archives, of charging (too much) for everything downloaded.
As a reader I would much prefer the former option. But extending the concept of the library into the electronic relm raises problems. I don't think that publishers, their (small) profits at stake, or writers, facing the prospect of no one paying for their work since they can download it for free, would support such a system, and I don't know what they'd put in its place.
How do you envision the digital libraries of the future (both the ideal and those we're likely to have)? Can we keep the information public while still protecting the rights of writers?
But what you're ignoring...
on
RMS On eBooks
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Let's put contentions about communism (groan) and WORKING IN COAL MINES aside. While you're perfectly correct that intellectual property must be protected, Stallman does have a valid point: readers of eBooks have far fewer rights than those of regular books. You can't legally share eBooks. You can't resell them. As someone who loves used bookstores and libraries, I would hate to live in a world like the one Stallman suggests is coming.
I think the most interesting point Stallman makes is about libraries. Going to a good library, you can get thousands of books for free, no questions asked. 50 years from now, assuming that most information is by then in electronic format, will we have the same liberties? How would the concept of a library extend into the electronic world?
The question, then: if our libraries become electronic, is there a way to preserve the rights of the public and the authors of the information members of the public want to access?
For that matter, if restrictive eBooks come into play (and if they're expensive, as they appear to be now), how long before they're cracked and their contents are made publically avaliable in some free format?
Neither am I convinced that paper books are here to stay. The costs of electronic publishing are potentially much lower; popular books may always be avaliable (if expensive...looked at a hardback lately?) in paper form, but more obscure works may not.
This could potentially become a battle similar to the one over electronic music (let's not call the concept by a name denoting a compression scheme)--another issue where one must apparently choose between two unreasonable sides, the conservative idiocy of the RIAA and the giddy "MP3s are a civil liberties issue" sort. I can only hope some engineers or legislators can figure out a way of preserving electronic libraries before their time arrives.
It would be much better to monitor students throughout the duration of the course and grade them on their overall progress.
If you can figure out how to do this, let university professors know. Many really don't like testing students in time-pressured exams. But what's the alternative for grading a class of a couple hundred? Or a couple dozen? Or even five or six? How do you keep such a system from becomming completely subjective?
Personally, I prefer just taking a test and getting a class over for better or for worse. But that's just me.
Re:Has anyone taken the AP calculus test.
on
Laptop Exams?
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· Score: 1
So much high school calculus seems to be on the use of the calculator instead of emphasizing understanding. The AP Calc has a calculator portion on it, or at least it did when I took it a few years back. I learned calc the traditional way, only buying a graphing calculator a few months before the exam. I did get a 5, but you can guess what section gave me the most trouble.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think that using computers for classwork (in math, at least) often inhibits understanding of the principles at hand. I took a Differential Equations class at Rice in which the emphasis was all on the use of MATLAB. We didn't even cover the Laplace transform, a rather important technique, instead spending time on computer trivialities. I ended up learning a lot more about MATLAB than math.
I don't mean that computers and calculators shouldn't be used, but when they become most important factor in a class, students' education suffers.
What do you use the laptops for (school-related, that is)? I ask because I've never seen much use for laptops. Sure, storage is a lot easier, and I guess they could be useful in labs not equipped with computers. But it's not like computers are good for notetaking--especially for engineers, considering that I know of no software ideally suited to jotting down mathematical equations. For that matter, I can't think of any exam I've taken in which access to the internet would have been useful.
In two quarters of school, I've only actually needed a laptop once, for a presentation. A friend who bought a laptop at the beginning of the year claims never to have used it except at his desk. I got a desktop (19" monitor, 256 MB RAM, nice standard components) for the same price he paid, a bit over 2 grand.
As I see it, there are two issues (apart from financial) regarding requiring students to buy laptops. First, a small private school should be able to afford adequate computer labs for all students. A policy of requiring students to buy their own computers makes more sense for a larger university where this is less practical...but why laptops? If they aren't made use of in some fashion specific to the classroom or lab, why not let students buy a cheaper and more powerful desktop?
The mandatory purchase of laptops sounds like a gimmick to me: "Look at us! We're a forward-looking institution!"
The idea behind perscription drugs is that, unlike over-the-counter medications, they aren't safe to be taken without medical advice. For example, many perscription drugs are potentially addictive--for example, many people get addicted to sleeping pills, tranquilizers, or worse; you also need to know about side effects and safe dosages. Ideally, doctors and their pharmacies would only let people have the drugs and the supply that they legitimately need. I believe that a few people have died while using Viagra from heart problems--unsurprising given the circumstances, but hopefully doctors would limit perscriptions to the healthy.
Of course, "internet doctors" don't exactly closely examine their patients. So how can they be assured that their perscription is appropriate?
But the internet isn't the only problem with the perscription drug system. Even if all doctors are honest, I can:
1. Attempt to impersonate a nurse calling in a perscription.
2. Take a perscription form and write what I want down on it.
I have no idea how pharmacies guard against this. I imagine it's quite possible to get an illegitimate perscription through these conventional means, though. Regardless, aren't telephone and paper perscriptions amazingly primitive anyway?
Here's my proposal for digital age perscriptions: A doctor enters a perscription on a computer (perhaps using convenient pull down menus of typical doses), enters his passphrase, and sends the digitally authenticated perscription to a database accessable to the pharmacies. The patient goes to a pharmacy which retrives the authenticated perscription. No more messy handwriting mistakes (which do happen), no phony perscriptions.
Actually, it says that about the NSC, not the NSA:
Zaman added that Microsoft likely would be willing to provide the National Security Council with its code for security inspections if it is for national security purposes. So far, he said, the NSC has not asked for access to any of Microsoft's software code.
The NSA is the evil agency we all know and love. What's the funciton of the NSC? Does it control the NSA?
Bureaucracy...reminds me of the part in Cryptonomicon when one of the characters has a waking nightmare while someone explains the German bureaucracy to him.
Access to the Linux source code "gives us some confidence," the White House official said, adding that it simplifies patching security breeches and correcting routine errors.
I've always wondered if the government, which uses Windows for much of its operations, is given (or pays for) the NT source. This quote seems to imply that they don't have it. Surprising, if so--I would have thought that the NSA would want to examine and/or customize the OS, at least for sensitive networks. Maybe I overestimate the competence of the US government.
Ah, no. If it failed to be ratified in the different states it would not _be_ the 16th amendment. The ERA was passed by Congress but never ratified by the requisite number of states; therefore it's not in the Constitution. Nobody can "proclaim" an amendment to be ratified. How could the states vote on any different wording from the one Congress passed?
And cite a source please--otherwise you sound like one of those crackpots who insist that Texas is not legally part of the US or some such...
The Federal government has _no_ right to take income taxes at all, and rely largely on ignorance of the law in order to collect them.
Indeed, the government did not have the right to levy income taxes until congress passed and the states approved the 16th amendment:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
This was approved in 1913. I'm afraid you're a bit behind the times. Nothing about taxes needing to be "voluntary."
My opinion: Down with sales taxes, from federal, state, or local governments, in stores real or virtual. They take a larger chunk out of the pocketbooks of people who spend more, and people with lower incomes have to spend a larger portion of their income. Progressive income taxes are a fairer method of taxation.
I don't know if Netscape wants to do what's "morally right" about Linux and open source, but let's not forget that Netscape is now part of AOL. AOL, like most other companies, has not been a champion of open standards or source or software morality or anything else when it goes against business strategy--witness what they did after MS attacked them on the IM front.
Furthermore, Netscape does suck. It crashes on me fairly frequently in both Linux and Windows. But I don't like Opera at all because of MDI. I tend to have seven or eight browser windows open at once--I'm always afraid that I'll forget to check a link, and it gives me something to do while a page is loading--so MDI is incredibly inconvenient.
Stanford doesn't have a program called "Computer Engineering." MIT lumps Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the same department. At Rice you can also only get an Electrical Engineering degree. I'm sure the situation is the same at other private (and maybe public) universities. Just because there's no major called "Computer Engineering" does not mean the relevant coursework isn't avaliable. It is.
There's a lot more than fossils to account for. Astronomers can observe objects that are billions of light years away. To believe (like the hard-line Creationists) that the world is new, you have to believe that either (a) God is faking the far-off light to test our faith or that (b) all science is bunk.
And yet I recently saw a poll that showed around 40% of people (I'm sorry, American people) believe that God created the world as it is a few thousand years ago. Just ten percent take a secular evolutionist perspective: life took care of itself. The rest believe in divinely guided evolution, which I think is Catholic Church doctrine.
Marginally relavant but interesting is this chart from a recent Scientific American on church attendance. America is topped only by Poland and Ireland.
There is a story about some American Legislature having considered a bill to legislate, for religious reasons, the biblical value of pi=3. I have found no confirmation of this story; very probably it grew out of an episode that actually took place in the State Legislature of Indiana in 1897.
Apparently what really happened is that someone decided that he had solved the old and impossible problem of squaring the circle. He then offered his discovery to Indiana royalty-free in exchange for them recognizing his mathematical truth. The legislation seems to imply that pi=16/sqrt(3)=9.2376... among other values. A Purdue professor finally noticed the legislation and that was the end of that. What a pity Kansas ignores its professors...
I highly recommend Beckmann's book to anyone interested in the subject. It's a great read and often hillarious.
Slashdot Mirror
Half Life was good, no doubt about it. But, as was pointed out in the article this linked to, System Shock 2 had a better plot, that plot was more was more integral to the gameplay, and was generally spectacular (much more interesting, in my view, than HalfLife). But it didn't sell well at all.
I think the reason it didn't sell was because it tried to straddle the boundary between RPG and FPS. You had to develop your skills and sneak around rather than blasting everything in sight like a FPS, which probably alienated some Quake fans. And you did have some very challenging combat sequences, which probably annoyed RPG fans.
People often call the boundaries between genres artificial (in games and otherwise...think SF/Fantasy/Horror), and they are. But gamers have come to expect certain things of games that go by the terms "FPS" or "Adventure" or "RPG" or "RTS"; mixing aspects of two or more will mean they don't know--and may not like--what they're getting. So even when great, innovative games are made, like System Shock, they don't always sell. Who's to blame? Not the companies. Gamers.
Are you sure? I was under the understanding that it's allowable to briefly "quote" from a copyright audio sample, just as with text, without violating the copyright. I don't know, however, if there's a specific amount of time that can be legally sampled/quoted. The scheme of attempting to reassemble a track from small samples would probably be illegal (as well as horribly tedious) because the intent is not to quote (which is fair use) but to pirate. Might as well just distribute the whole song as far as the law's concerned.
As a closed beta tester who had lots of fun with it, I'd like to say it once and for all:
The stress test sucks. Bad.
The stress test is not the game. It is as representative of it as the demo to the original Diablo, with the first two levels of 16 and only the warrior. In fact, given that Diablo II has 5 character classes as opposed to 3, I imagine that the stress test shows even less of the game than the Diablo demo.
What do you have to look forward to in the actual game? Well, for one, you have not merely one, not two or three but four other classes, each one far more interesting to play than the barbarian--IMO of course! I for one am not going to waste my time with the barbarian--my first character will be a Sorceress, Paladin, or Amazon, all three of which have interesting skills and much more of that complexity of gameplay you speak of. (Curiously, I found the Necromancer a bit dull as time went on.)
The closed beta was good (particularly in how they manage multiplayer), but I'm sure the final game will be much better, with more places to go, more monsters to kill, (hopefully) more challenge, and more great items (which are after all the point of Diablo).
I share your view about the lamentable passing of Looking Glass. However, the situation with Looking Glass is a bit more complicated than that; Eidos wasn't the only contributor to the disaster, and even if it were, Eidos has problems bigger than Ion Storm and Daikatana. Here's an explanation from an ex-Looking Glass employee.
(Still, I have to wonder: why is it so hard to get good games published? And why don't gaming companies make more innovative games like Thief? Then again, the same mediocrity exists in Hollywood, the music industry, TV, and American pop culture generally...)
At least in the closed beta, Blizzard selected applicants in part based on the geographical distribution they wanted. If 100k Koreans and 100k North Americans apply, Blizzard isn't going to give half to Koreans and half to Americans...the point is to test their servers in a reasonable manner.
Plenty of people will get in on the open beta. Not that it's going to be all that great, since it contains an abridged version of Act I with only the Barbarian, the least interesting character to play (yes, I'm one of those lucky closed beta testers). A day's amusement, if that.
Recently you wrote an interesting article about how readers of eBooks may lack the rights readers of paper books currently have.
This article got me wondering what would become of libraries if, a few decades from now, most written information was electronic. (Because of lower electronic publishing costs I believe paper's days are numbered.) One option could be having vast numbers of books stored on a system of public servers free of charge, or for a small charge. Or we could turn to the system, like most newspapers online do for their archives, of charging (too much) for everything downloaded.
As a reader I would much prefer the former option. But extending the concept of the library into the electronic relm raises problems. I don't think that publishers, their (small) profits at stake, or writers, facing the prospect of no one paying for their work since they can download it for free, would support such a system, and I don't know what they'd put in its place.
How do you envision the digital libraries of the future (both the ideal and those we're likely to have)? Can we keep the information public while still protecting the rights of writers?
Let's put contentions about communism (groan) and WORKING IN COAL MINES aside. While you're perfectly correct that intellectual property must be protected, Stallman does have a valid point: readers of eBooks have far fewer rights than those of regular books. You can't legally share eBooks. You can't resell them. As someone who loves used bookstores and libraries, I would hate to live in a world like the one Stallman suggests is coming.
I think the most interesting point Stallman makes is about libraries. Going to a good library, you can get thousands of books for free, no questions asked. 50 years from now, assuming that most information is by then in electronic format, will we have the same liberties? How would the concept of a library extend into the electronic world?
The question, then: if our libraries become electronic, is there a way to preserve the rights of the public and the authors of the information members of the public want to access?
For that matter, if restrictive eBooks come into play (and if they're expensive, as they appear to be now), how long before they're cracked and their contents are made publically avaliable in some free format?
Neither am I convinced that paper books are here to stay. The costs of electronic publishing are potentially much lower; popular books may always be avaliable (if expensive...looked at a hardback lately?) in paper form, but more obscure works may not.
This could potentially become a battle similar to the one over electronic music (let's not call the concept by a name denoting a compression scheme)--another issue where one must apparently choose between two unreasonable sides, the conservative idiocy of the RIAA and the giddy "MP3s are a civil liberties issue" sort.
I can only hope some engineers or legislators can figure out a way of preserving electronic libraries before their time arrives.
If you can figure out how to do this, let university professors know. Many really don't like testing students in time-pressured exams. But what's the alternative for grading a class of a couple hundred? Or a couple dozen? Or even five or six? How do you keep such a system from becomming completely subjective?
Personally, I prefer just taking a test and getting a class over for better or for worse. But that's just me.
So much high school calculus seems to be on the use of the calculator instead of emphasizing understanding. The AP Calc has a calculator portion on it, or at least it did when I took it a few years back. I learned calc the traditional way, only buying a graphing calculator a few months before the exam. I did get a 5, but you can guess what section gave me the most trouble.
To get back to the topic at hand, I think that using computers for classwork (in math, at least) often inhibits understanding of the principles at hand. I took a Differential Equations class at Rice in which the emphasis was all on the use of MATLAB. We didn't even cover the Laplace transform, a rather important technique, instead spending time on computer trivialities. I ended up learning a lot more about MATLAB than math.
I don't mean that computers and calculators shouldn't be used, but when they become most important factor in a class, students' education suffers.
What do you use the laptops for (school-related, that is)? I ask because I've never seen much use for laptops. Sure, storage is a lot easier, and I guess they could be useful in labs not equipped with computers. But it's not like computers are good for notetaking--especially for engineers, considering that I know of no software ideally suited to jotting down mathematical equations. For that matter, I can't think of any exam I've taken in which access to the internet would have been useful.
In two quarters of school, I've only actually needed a laptop once, for a presentation. A friend who bought a laptop at the beginning of the year claims never to have used it except at his desk. I got a desktop (19" monitor, 256 MB RAM, nice standard components) for the same price he paid, a bit over 2 grand.
As I see it, there are two issues (apart from financial) regarding requiring students to buy laptops. First, a small private school should be able to afford adequate computer labs for all students. A policy of requiring students to buy their own computers makes more sense for a larger university where this is less practical...but why laptops? If they aren't made use of in some fashion specific to the classroom or lab, why not let students buy a cheaper and more powerful desktop?
The mandatory purchase of laptops sounds like a gimmick to me: "Look at us! We're a forward-looking institution!"
The idea behind perscription drugs is that, unlike over-the-counter medications, they aren't safe to be taken without medical advice. For example, many perscription drugs are potentially addictive--for example, many people get addicted to sleeping pills, tranquilizers, or worse; you also need to know about side effects and safe dosages. Ideally, doctors and their pharmacies would only let people have the drugs and the supply that they legitimately need. I believe that a few people have died while using Viagra from heart problems--unsurprising given the circumstances, but hopefully doctors would limit perscriptions to the healthy.
Of course, "internet doctors" don't exactly closely examine their patients. So how can they be assured that their perscription is appropriate?
But the internet isn't the only problem with the perscription drug system. Even if all doctors are honest, I can:
1. Attempt to impersonate a nurse calling in a perscription.
2. Take a perscription form and write what I want down on it.
I have no idea how pharmacies guard against this. I imagine it's quite possible to get an illegitimate perscription through these conventional means, though. Regardless, aren't telephone and paper perscriptions amazingly primitive anyway?
Here's my proposal for digital age perscriptions: A doctor enters a perscription on a computer (perhaps using convenient pull down menus of typical doses), enters his passphrase, and sends the digitally authenticated perscription to a database accessable to the pharmacies. The patient goes to a pharmacy which retrives the authenticated perscription. No more messy handwriting mistakes (which do happen), no phony perscriptions.
The NSA is the evil agency we all know and love. What's the funciton of the NSC? Does it control the NSA?
Bureaucracy...reminds me of the part in Cryptonomicon when one of the characters has a waking nightmare while someone explains the German bureaucracy to him.
I've always wondered if the government, which uses Windows for much of its operations, is given (or pays for) the NT source. This quote seems to imply that they don't have it. Surprising, if so--I would have thought that the NSA would want to examine and/or customize the OS, at least for sensitive networks. Maybe I overestimate the competence of the US government.
Ah, no. If it failed to be ratified in the different states it would not _be_ the 16th amendment. The ERA was passed by Congress but never ratified by the requisite number of states; therefore it's not in the Constitution. Nobody can "proclaim" an amendment to be ratified. How could the states vote on any different wording from the one Congress passed?
And cite a source please--otherwise you sound like one of those crackpots who insist that Texas is not legally part of the US or some such...
Here is an article about the ship that went down--I think this is the incident you're referring to. Most amusing.
Indeed, the government did not have the right to levy income taxes until congress passed and the states approved the 16th amendment:
This was approved in 1913. I'm afraid you're a bit behind the times. Nothing about taxes needing to be "voluntary."
My opinion: Down with sales taxes, from federal, state, or local governments, in stores real or virtual. They take a larger chunk out of the pocketbooks of people who spend more, and people with lower incomes have to spend a larger portion of their income. Progressive income taxes are a fairer method of taxation.
I don't know if Netscape wants to do what's "morally right" about Linux and open source, but let's not forget that Netscape is now part of AOL. AOL, like most other companies, has not been a champion of open standards or source or software morality or anything else when it goes against business strategy--witness what they did after MS attacked them on the IM front.
Furthermore, Netscape does suck. It crashes on me fairly frequently in both Linux and Windows. But I don't like Opera at all because of MDI. I tend to have seven or eight browser windows open at once--I'm always afraid that I'll forget to check a link, and it gives me something to do while a page is loading--so MDI is incredibly inconvenient.
Stanford doesn't have a program called "Computer Engineering." MIT lumps Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the same department. At Rice you can also only get an Electrical Engineering degree. I'm sure the situation is the same at other private (and maybe public) universities. Just because there's no major called "Computer Engineering" does not mean the relevant coursework isn't avaliable. It is.
You mean, I assume, Grace Murray Hopper.
There's a lot more than fossils to account for. Astronomers can observe objects that are billions of light years away. To believe (like the hard-line Creationists) that the world is new, you have to believe that either (a) God is faking the far-off light to test our faith or that (b) all science is bunk.
And yet I recently saw a poll that showed around 40% of people (I'm sorry, American people) believe that God created the world as it is a few thousand years ago. Just ten percent take a secular evolutionist perspective: life took care of itself. The rest believe in divinely guided evolution, which I think is Catholic Church doctrine.
Marginally relavant but interesting is this chart from a recent Scientific American on church attendance. America is topped only by Poland and Ireland.
Apparently what really happened is that someone decided that he had solved the old and impossible problem of squaring the circle. He then offered his discovery to Indiana royalty-free in exchange for them recognizing his mathematical truth. The legislation seems to imply that pi=16/sqrt(3)=9.2376... among other values. A Purdue professor finally noticed the legislation and that was the end of that. What a pity Kansas ignores its professors...
I highly recommend Beckmann's book to anyone interested in the subject. It's a great read and often hillarious.